May 6, 2012 | Latest
Finished ‘A Small Circus’ by Hans Fallada. Love his writing though this would not be on a par with ‘Alone in Berlin’. It is set around 1928/1929 in a small provincial German town and opens with a cattle seizure by bailiffs followed by the consequences for the police,...
Apr 10, 2012 | Latest
Finished the ‘Rolling Stone Interviews’, published 2007. Pete Townshend on what comes first: “When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape recorder and I try...
Mar 27, 2012 | Latest
Finished ‘The Shape of Water’ by Andrea Camilleri from which the series currently running on BBC4 on Saturday nights has been adapted, ‘Inspector Montalbano’. This is the ‘First Inspector Montalbano Mystery’. It is full of little quotes which enrich the work. For...
Mar 2, 2012 | Latest
‘Love Matters’ by Gary Mitchell is much in the vein of his ‘Billy’ plays, so-to-speak, which deal critically and show little sympathy with the domestic lives of loyalist paramilitaries, usually the UDA (which actually drove Mitchell out of his North Belfast home). I...
Feb 21, 2012 | Latest
On the way back from Dublin airport on Saturday I decided to come off the motorway before the toll and went into Drogheda to spend an hour or two. Found a free parking space, near pensioners’ bungalows just off Scarlet Street, and in the glorious morning sun, walked...
Feb 8, 2012 | Latest
Finished the novel ‘A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers’ by Xiaolu Guo, published in 2007, the diary of Zhuang Xiao Qiao, a young Chinese woman who comes to London to learn English. The almost-charming book, written in mangled English, is funny and...
